Time-Lapse

January 1, 2017

Throughout 2016,
I took photos of the construction in my neighborhood every two weeks. The original plan was to take photos once a week,
but I forgot every other week or it was dark already by the time I got home.

On the first day of 2017, I created a choppy time-lapse showing the changes that took place the past twelve months.
I had taken three photos every time to capture all the construction:

First, I used Photoshop to stitch the photos together.
I experimented with various layouts to get something like this:

Then, I imported the photos into Adobe Premiere after stitching them together.
Because I did not use a tripod when taking photos, the positions of the buildings in the photos did not match up.
Also, stitching caused distortion on the edges of the photos.
So, I dragged the first photo in the timeline and placed some reference markers on the photo.
For example, I placed markers outlining buildings under construction,
since I want those to remain in a similar position from frame to frame so that I can emphasize the progression.

Next, I dragged the second photo onto the timeline and then moved it around in the frame so the buildings matched the markers.
I did that with each photo to try to get the best resulting time-lapse as possible.
It was impossible to get every building to match frame after frame, especially with the distortion at the edges of the photos.
But it gives an idea of all the construction progress in 2016.

I’m still taking photos of the construction. Instead, I’m trying to take them at a consistent time of the day and at a higher frequency (every morning). Maybe there will be a better looking time-lapse in 2018!!